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In this presentation:
02:01 – These are GIANT advertisements!
03:50 – Why people use content for advertising
04:31 – The power of content plus paid ads
06:27 – Justin’s journey
07:06 – This changed Justin’s life
08:57 – Real-time, real-figure YouTube stats
10:22 – The most valuable real estate on the Internet
11:13 – Who’s doing content advertising?
12:40 – How to peek into your competitor’s Google Analytics
13:23 – Breaking down effective content creation
13:29 – 4 types of failproof content
15:37 – How to create the perfect blog layout
17:44 – A formula to create content that sells
19:28 – This is what you need to make a sale
22:10 – Best networks to promote content
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Tweetables:
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Transcription:
James: What we got next is the bigger version of what we just saw there. That was a little Brooke; we’re going to get the bigger Brooke. So Justin Brooke turned $60 into a six-figure business. I’ve known Justin for quite some time. He came on my radar when he was flipping sites, buying and selling them. He has worked in some big operations, he’s gone out on his own, he’s got a very successful traffic agency, he’s right in the thick of it with all the best traffic practice.
And what I also should say is that sometimes we’ve been fierce rivals in the traffic scene, competing for things, and now we’re best of friends. So I really think you should gauge yourself by the size of your competitors, and Justin has a big reputation. If I project a few years from now, I could see that on the traffic scene he’s going to be like the kingpin. So we’re very lucky to have a good session here and we’re going to learn some great stuff around traffic and conversions as well. So please welcome, all the way from the USA, Justin Brooke.
Justin: Thank you, man. I was really worried what surfing picture he was going to choose. He was very nice to me, not using my picture. It would have been great.
Have You Seen These Advertisements?
All right, so does anybody know what this picture is up on the screen, can you raise your hand? Go ahead. I saw you first. It’s Felix Baumgartner. And he did the highest freefall jump ever. Jumped from space back down to Earth, and had a parachute. And the whole world was tuning in to this; I know I was standing still with James. So the whole world was tuning into this at the same time, on YouTube.
It has 36 million visitors, but there was hundreds of millions of visitors during the time when this was running live. And actually, what this is, is a giant advertisement. This is an advertisement for Red Bull. This is the only type of advertisement Red Bull does now. They no longer advertise their product. They only use content to advertise their product.
Anybody know who these people are? I’m in Australia, this is a US show, so this might not go over too well. This here is Luke and Laura, a famous couple from “General Hospital,” which is a soap opera over in the States. And a quick history lesson on soap operas. They were created by companies like Dove soaps, Procter and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, so that they could reach their target market, which was the stay-at-home moms.
So they created content in order to gain the attention of their market so that they could then advertise their products to them. And these things are still running decades later, afterwards. I don’t know if it’s a hundred years, but they’ve been going on for quite a while, and these guys, they do not look like that anymore.
Content As A Trojan Horse
So the reason why people are using content in their advertising these days, and I’ll show you that they’ve been doing it for a long time, is because it’s like a Trojan horse. You slide in under the customer’s radar. They’re not in their skepticism mode of trying to figure out what you’re pitching them and what the price is and are you reputable.
They’re just enjoying the content and they’re building trust and rapport and all these other things that I’ll talk about. But it’s like the old Trojan horse where they presented a gift, and they got past the defenses, and then they were able to accomplish their mission.
And what I’m here to tell you today is that if you use the power of content marketing, and you combine it with the power of paid ads, it will be like gasoline on a fire. This is the only type of advertising I do today, and it’s how I gain all of my customers. I’m sold out on my coaching program; I’m sold out on my client list right now, all because of what I’m telling you here today.
So this has been being done for a long time now, this is some of the old guides that have come before me. This is Guinness beer and how they used to advertise their product in bars and in restaurants. They would supply these signs which were educational. It would help the restaurant and the bars sell more food and they would also be able to sell more beer. So this has been being done for tons and tons of years. Our grandparents would have seen this.
Anybody seen this show? This isn’t a show. This is a giant advertisement for Jennie-O Turkey and Planet Fitness. People bid millions of dollars to be able to be on this show, and nobody watches commercials anymore, but you don’t have to. This whole entire show, I mean, I want to puke when I watch this show, because it’s just… They stop and they’re like, “Oh, look at my Jennie-O Turkey that I’m eating.” It’s super cheesy, but it is. It’s just a giant piece of content and it’s wildly popular. It’s just a piece of advertising.
And then we have “American Idol.” They have an Australian version of this, I’m sure, and they’ve got a Malaysian version. This, again, the whole purpose of this piece of content is to sell you a record at the end of it. And now they’ve tapped into iTunes and you can buy the songs before the person’s even won. So you can buy songs from the losers.
They’ve created multi-millionaires. Kelly Clarkson and, not Miranda Lambert, Carrie Underwood, from the show. So just trying to really hammer in that content as an advertising medium has been working – it’s been working at super high levels, and it can work at low levels as well.
Some Background On Justin
So a little bit about me, before I kind of break it down on how to do this stuff. My name’s Justin Brooke, I started out in 2007. Back then I had an internship with Russell Brunson where my job was to go through his quarter of a million dollar marketing library and write affiliate review articles on all these courses. So I got an education of a lifetime, he got free work. And I took that education, came back home, I was still broke when I came back home, it was an unpaid internship.
Wrestled my last $60 off of my beautiful wife, and turned that into a Google AdWords campaign, doubled my money the first month, second month, eleven months in a row, doubling my money, had a six-figure business. And for me, paid traffic is what changed my life. I mean the internship, when I came home and I actually started doing paid traffic that was the thing that took me from eating ramen noodles to going out to Red Lobster, which is where all the kingpins go.
So that’s why I’m a paid traffic geek. That’s why I follow this stuff. It consumes my life. Already this year, I’ve driven over a million clicks; I’ll probably drive about five million if I stay on this track this year. I’ve landed some really great clients. Stansberry Research, which is a nine-figure company; Rich Schefren, who’s probably one of the biggest gurus out there; Trump University; Snuggie, I used to drive traffic for Snuggie. Lots of others.
The reason why I get some great clients is I get some really compelling results. My favorite one is the newest one, down here at the bottom. This is in one month for one of my clients. Hundreds of thousands of clicks. I think that’s about 800 sales. You can see my cost per click was great, and my cost per sale was great. Here it’s about $160 per sale. And we’re getting sales for about 30, 40 bucks each. Some other good results. I do this stuff. And even more so than my own results, I want to show you that what I’m talking to you about today, I’m actually doing right now.
This is the last 30 days of my YouTube video ads account, and you can see I’m not spending a lot of money. I don’t actually spend a lot of money on advertising because I’m able to leverage the power of the content that I’m using my paid ads to. So if you’re looking for a source of traffic that doesn’t require a lot of maintenance, it doesn’t require a lot of technical ability, it doesn’t require large budgets, this is what you should be doing.
All right. So this is my YouTube video ads account, this is inside my Twitter ads account. Most people don’t know that Twitter has a very robust advertising platform, very competitive to Facebook. The clicks, the targeting, when I’m inside Twitter, it feels exactly like Facebook. I wish I could get more people onto the Twitter ads because it’s really, really impressive. You can see over there the 1.29 thousand engagements. Those are not just clicks. Those are people that are retweeting my ads. I love that. Every time they retweet one of my squeeze pages or my content, it just makes me giggle a little bit.
Leveraging Facebook
And then here’s inside Facebook. You can see we’ve got 1,500 clicks over there, 943 new fans last month. And again, I’m not spending a whole lot of money on this stuff. Here’s what one of my ads actually looks like on Facebook. It doesn’t look like a product ad. It looks like a piece of content because it is actually a piece of content. But if you ever clicked on that ad, at the bottom of that, you would see an offer for my coaching program that takes you to an application page.
So it’s a two-step process very much like, if you’ve ever looked in any of the magazines, anybody who’s ever done serious magazine advertisement knows that you don’t want your magazine ad to look like an ad. You want it to look like a piece of content. They call them advertorials. That’s exactly what I’m talking about today.
And Facebook, inside the newsfeed, is the most valuable real estate on the Internet today, I believe. Other than Google, maybe YouTube, the Facebook newsfeed is more valuable, I believe, than the inbox. People are looking at the newsfeed more often, and everybody is throwing these ads in there that look like ads. They’ve got their products on there, their prices, red borders, weird eyeballs… I mean there’s just crazy ads they’re putting in there, where you could be looking like a piece of content, which is what people want to see in their newsfeed, and it’s like a Trojan horse.
You go in, you slide in under their defenses, and you get them over there, and then you’re building trust, you’re building respect, you’re building a relationship with them, you’re not just selling to them. We’ll talk some more about that here, and you can see again, my ad is being liked, it’s being shared, this one actually doesn’t have as many shares as some of our other ones.
Who’s Doing It?
I’m not the only one that’s doing this. There are multi-million dollar companies that are doing this right now.
This right here is from a website called HealthHeadlines.com. You can check it out, and I suggest that you do. You should write this one down, you should check this one out, you should be studying this one tonight when you go back to the hotel, because this blog is perfectly monetized, it makes them millions of dollars. This is made by a company who has a pill, a supplement, called Force Factor.
Has anybody here heard of Force Factor? Anybody? Nobody? OK. I’ve got to stop using US references. So Force Factor is a muscle-building pill, and the majority of the advertising they do goes to the pages on this blog, and if you check out this blog, every single page is an interesting, educational article that also sells one of their supplements or something that they’re an affiliate for.
Next one here. And this company, they don’t actually sell their own products. This is an affiliate marketer who, all they do is write these pieces of content, and then this is actually an advertisement for CreditKarma.com, and they get paid to put these posts on the site, they put their own posts and have affiliate links, and they drive millions and millions of clicks to this website.
Here’s a look at their traffic: 2.4 million visitors per month. And if you don’t know about SimilarWeb.com, this is an amazing tool. It’s like being able to peek into your competitor’s Google analytics. I’ve just typed in their website, and I can see their bounce rate, page views, time on site, how much traffic they’re getting, what their graph looks like and if you scroll down on this you can see a lot more things. What websites are sending them traffic, where their traffic goes to afterwards. So, an amazing, free tool.
Content That Works
All right, so let’s break down how to actually do this. I’m going to have to talk slower. I’m only like three minutes in. We’re like halfway done. Let’s have a moment of silence. All right, so let’s break it down here.
The types of content that work really, really well. I like to use common mistakes, just because there’s an old school headline that has been proven to work over and over again. If you remember back to my Facebook ad over there, it said, “Are you making these mistakes with your Facebook ads?” The old school headline was, “Are you making these mistakes with your English?” And so I like to find headlines that have been proven to work over time.
Great marketers before me have already done the work, figured out what works, all the split testing. And then I just modify the headline a little bit to work with mine. So nobody likes to make mistakes. Nobody really likes to prevent something, but they want to have a cure for a problem.
So if you can tell someone “These are the mistakes you’re probably making,” they get scared, they get worried, and they want to make sure that they’re not making those mistakes. And when I say content, I mean it could be an image, it could be an audio, a video, a blog post, whatever’s comfortable for you. I don’t care what the medium is; all I care about is that you’re using this strategy. So talk about the common mistakes that they might be making.
Listicles is a really stupid word, but everybody’s using it, and it’s basically an article that is a list. So, “Three Ways to Grow Bigger Muscles.” You know, “Five Different Foods That Are Probably Making You Fatter.” I mean, all kinds of different lists that you would make. Those types of articles, those type of videos, whatever, they work really well.
Case studies. Everybody loves to hear how John made $10,000 in two minutes, or how Lucy lost 20 pounds last weekend. So case studies work really well.
And then the last on the list, if you can’t think of anything else, just use a “how to do something.” And if you can throw in some sort of word that makes it a little bit curious, adds a little bit of curiosity into there, great. I’m not going to try and think of copy on the fly right now, but “how to” works really good as well.
How To Layout Your Blog
What I believe is the perfect blog layout? I’ve been trying this for a long time, and I feel like I’ve finally stumbled on the best version yet. Maybe next year, I’ll find something that works a little bit better, but this is my current iteration of what I think the perfect blog layout is.
At the top, you’ve got a header opt-in, you’ll notice James is using this, I’m using this, Derek Halpern from Social Triggers is using this, guys that I really respect that I know are doing split testing and not just talking about it, they all have a header opt-in on their website. I’ve seen that work better than the pop-ups. Now, granted, if you have a horrible header opt-in versus an amazing pop-up, it will probably prove me a liar. But that’s worked really, really well for me.
And then what we have, we have two other offers on the post footer, just below the post, and then on the sidebar. I don’t put a bunch of stuff on my sidebar. I don’t want them to do a bunch of stuff. I want them to do what I want them to do when they get to my blog post. So we have two different offers on the page. The header opt-in is usually some cool tool, something really fast.
For me, it’s a spreadsheet of 202 traffic resources. It’s something that anybody who comes to my website, they’re like, “Oh, that’s cool, I’d like to have that spreadsheet.” And then on the sidebar and the post footer is usually something a little bit more in-depth. So for us, it’s a one-hour video on how to drive a million visitors per year.
For you, you’ll just think of what cool one-hour lesson or half-hour lesson could you give to somebody that they would really want, and then offer that there on your sidebar. In my sidebar, the only two things I have is I have that offer, and then I have a little button that shows how many Facebook fans we have and they can click Like, because I want fans, and I want leads from my content.
All right. And the other thing here, you’ll notice that my sidebar was on the left, instead of the right. For a long time, I had my sidebar on the right. Some of my friends told me that when they were testing it, it worked better on the left. I tried it as well, worked better on the left. I don’t know if it’s just because people read from left to right, I don’t know why it happens, it may be different in other countries, but that’s what’s working really well for me, instead of putting it on the right.
The formula for pre-selling
Now actually, when you’re creating the content, there’s a formula to how you should create that piece of content so that you’re pre-selling the person on the next step. It’s not just about putting content out there for content’s sake. That’s horrible. That’s a waste of money, you’re wasting their time, you’re wasting your time. Instead, you want to be creating content that is designed to get them to the next step, which is actually the lead or the sale.
So you want to start with an NLP technique called the Yes Set. Do any of you in here want to make more money? Who in here just said “Yes”? You all just said “Yes.” That’s a yes set. You ask a question that has an obvious “Yes” answer. A stupidly obvious “Yes” answer so that you get them in the very beginning of the piece of content. They’re already agreeing with you. Before they’ve even heard what you have to say, they’re already in agreement with you.
And I usually like to start out the content with three Yes Sets. So if I’m doing something with weight loss, “Do you want to lose weight? Would you like to lose more than 20 pounds? Do you want to do it in less than a month?” You know, these would all be Yes Sets for someone.
And now I start getting into explaining the problem. I had the great opportunity to work with Rich Schefren for a few years. The guy’s brilliant, he’s used free reports to build a multi-million dollar business. Every free report he releases to the market makes him on average over a million dollars. There was a lot of late nights working with him. We used to smoke cigars, drink a little bit of Scotch, we were discussing marketing, whatever, it was great times.
And he would tell me that the way to sell is you need to – and somebody else has already mentioned this weekend – the way to make a sale is you need to be able to explain the problem to the prospect better than they themselves understand it, because that’s how they instantly know, “Oh, you’re smarter than me. You know something that I don’t know, you really understand this. I want to learn more from you.”
And that’s how he’s been able to have so much success with his free reports. The first 20 pages of his reports are just explaining the problem back to you better than you yourself probably understand the problem. So explain the problem to them as best as you can.
Why And How
Then you want to go into the how and the why. James gave a great analogy the other day where he was talking about how, if you’re giving someone the compliment sandwich where they have a compliment, and then you have, ”Here’s what you’re actually doing wrong,” and you finish with a compliment. This part doesn’t really matter.
You know, this is the part they’re kind of going to forget. What really matters is the beginning and the end, how you set the tone and then the call to action you give them. So the how and the why, just put in there, here’s how this problem is happening, here’s why this problem is happening, you just put a little bit of content in here, not super important. Explaining the problem and the Yes Set, ultra important.
Teasing The Solution
Finally, after you get through the how and the why, you want to tease the solution. You don’t want to let the cat out of the bag, but you want to let them know. So for example, in my “Are you making these mistakes in Facebook?”
You know, I start out by getting them to understand. “Are you doing these things, have you seen these things happening in the marketplace? Well actually, they don’t work really well, and the reason why they don’t work really well” – I’m really super simplifying the article – “the reason why they really don’t work well is because of this and because of that. Here’s what actually works well, is this and that. Now if you want to avoid these mistakes and you want to skip past the expensive trial and error portions, there is an option for you where you can skip to the head of the class.”
And so I’m alluding to the solution, and that’s what you do at the end. You make them go to the next page to actually get the solution. You don’t tell them what the solution is, but you kind of allude to what it may be and what the possibilities of the solution are so that they’re curious enough to want to go to that next page.
And that next page could be a VSL, it could be a webinar registration. This will greatly increase the amount of people who are attending your webinars, who are sticking through your webinars because instead of them just going straight to the registration page where they’re kind of curious and they don’t really know, they’re getting a piece of content and now they really want to be on this webinar.
They know who you are, they’ve already been given some value, and now it really changes the tone between somebody just becoming a lead because they were curious what was behind that wall that was stopping them, versus someone who wants to become a lead because they really liked what you had to offer, and now they really want to hear from you. So it really changes the context. It goes from you chasing them to them chasing you.
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Holy cow, Justin; you just earned yourself a subscriber. There are some pretty sweet takeaways and can say that in the first ten minutes of watching, this page was added to my Favorites in Pocket.
Holy cow, Justin; you just earned yourself a subscriber. There are some pretty sweet takeaways and can say that in the first ten minutes of watching, this page was added to my Favorites in Pocket.
Great stuff as always James. I took some serious notes here.
Thank you !
Great stuff as always James. I took some serious notes here.